The Blunderer (9 page)

“Refill?” the barman asked, his hand on Walter's glass.

“No, thanks” Walter said. “I'll wait a minute.”

Walter lighted another cigarette and continued to stare down at the bottles and glasses on the lower shelf of the bar. Melchior Kimmel was a bookdealer, Walter remembered. Walter wondered if anyone would be able to tell if someone were a murderer just by looking at him? Not beyond a doubt, of course, but be able to tell if a person were capable of murdering or not? Suddenly he was filled with curiosity about Melchior Kimmel. He wanted to go to Newark and see if there were a bookshop owned by Melchior Kimmel, if there were a man called Melchior Kimmel whom he could actually see.

Walter paid for his drink, left a tip, and went out.

That night, sleeping in his study, Walter dreamed that he went to visit Melchior Kimmel at a bookshop, and that Kimmel turned out to be one of the half-naked atlantes of gray stone that supported the long lintel of the store. Walter recognized him at once and began to speak to him, but Melchior Kimmel only laughed, his stone belly shaking, and refused to reply to anything Walter asked him.

9

T
he next day was Saturday. Walter slept until after nine, and when he went downstairs to breakfast Claudia told him that Clara had gone.

“She said she was going shopping in Garden City,” Claudia said. “Didn't know when she'd be back.”

“I see. Thanks,” Walter said.

By three in the afternoon, Clara was still not home. Walter had mowed the lawn and trimmed the two thick clumps of hedges, and had finished a book that Dick Jensen had lent him on the New York penal code. He felt restless, and drank a bottle of beer, hoping it would make him sleepy enough to take a nap. It didn't. Just before four, Walter got into his car and headed for Newark.

There was no Melchior Kimmel in the telephone book, but there was a Kimmel's Bookstore at 313 South Huron Street. Walter didn't know the first thing about Newark streets. He asked directions from a clerk in the cigar store where he had used the telephone book. The man said it was about ten blocks away, and explained how to get there.

The shop was in a grimy commercial street. Walter glanced automatically for the atlantes on the front of the shop, but there were not any. He saw a couple of dusty-looking front windows full of books on both sides of a recessed door. It looked like a shop that specialized in students' texts and second-hand books. Walter put his car on the other side of the street, got out, and approached the shop slowly. He saw no one inside except a young man with glasses, reading a book as he leaned against one of the long tables. There was a pyramid of algebra texts in one window, and in the other window an assortment of popular novels spread out in radiating lines from a card that said 89 cents in red letters. Walter went in.

The place had a stale, sweetish smell. Shelves of books covered every wall from floor to ceiling. There were two long tables extending half the length of the shop, on which books were heaped in disorder. Two or three naked lightbulbs hung from the ceiling, and there was a brighter light in the back. Walter walked on slowly. Under the bright hanging light that was shaded with a green glass shade, Walter saw a bald-headed man of about forty sitting at a desk. Walter felt positive that he was Melchior Kimmel as if he had recognized him from a photograph he had seen before.

The man looked up at Walter. He had a large pinkish mouth with oversized lips that looked painfully swollen. His small eyes behind rimless glasses followed Walter's progress for a moment, then he looked down again at the papers on his desk. Passing him—the shop extended another couple of yards beyond the desk and ended in more shelves of books—Walter saw that his body was proportionally as large and heavy as his face. The curve of his back looked mountainous under the fresh white shirt. The remains of a light-brown head of hair curled a little above his ears and curved around below the rather disgusting, shiny pink back of his head.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” the man asked Walter, pulling himself around in his chair by gripping a corner of the desk. His heavy underlip hung a little.

“No, thank you. Do you mind if I just look around?”

“Not a bit.” He turned back to his papers.

It was a civilized voice, Walter thought, not at all the voice he had expected from that body. Except that the man's face was intelligent, too, despite its ugliness. Walter felt his momentum beginning to stall. He was only a man whose wife had been killed, Walter thought, a man to whom a violent tragedy had happened. It struck him as absurd now that he had ever wondered if Melchior Kimmel had actually murdered his wife. Wouldn't the police have found out by now if it were true?

Walter stood facing a shelf that was labeled
POETRY-METAPHYSICAL.
The books were old, most of them scholarly-looking. Walter saw the law division and went towards it. He wanted to talk to the man again. Walter stared at the row of rotting volumes of Blackstone's
Commentaries
, a hodge-podge of torts,
New Jersey Civil Courts 1938, NewYork State Bar Journal 1945, American Law Reports 1933
, Moore's
Weight of Evidence.
Walter strolled back toward the man under the lamp.

“I wonder if you possibly have a book called
Men Who Stretch the Law?”
Walter asked. “I'm pretty sure of the title, but I'm not sure of the author. I think it's by Robert Miles.”

“Men Who Stretch the Law?”
the man repeated, getting up. “About how old is it?”

“About fifteen years, I think.”

The man stopped at the law shelves and pointed a pen flashlight at the titles, went over them rapidly, then pulled the front row of books down with his forearm and looked at the books behind. The shelf was lighted, and there had been no need of the flash for the front row. Walter supposed that his sight was bad. The light over the desk was extremely strong.

“That wouldn't be by Marvin Cudahy, would it?”

Walter knew the name, but was surprised that Kimmel knew it—a retired Chicago judge who had written a couple of obscure books on legal ethics. “I'm pretty sure it isn't Cudahy's,” Walter said. “I don't know the author. I only know the title.”

The man looked Walter over from his superior height, and Walter sensed or imagined a personal element in the inspection that rattled him a little, made him glance from the man's tiny pale-brown eyes down to the front of the clean white shirt. “I can probably get it for you,” Kimmel said. “A matter of a few weeks at most. Do you want to leave your name so I can notify you?”

“Thanks.” He followed the man back to his desk. He felt suddenly shy about revealing his name, but when Kimmel waited with his pencil poised over the tables, Walter said, “Stackhouse,” and spelled it out as he always did. “Forty-nine, Marlborough Road, Benedict, Long Island.”

“Long Island,” Kimmel murmured, writing quickly.

“You're Melchior Kimmel, aren't you?” Walter asked.

“Yes.” The tawny eyes, reduced to absurd smallness by the thick glasses, looked straight at Walter.

“I seem to remember—your wife was killed not so long ago, wasn't she?”

“She was murdered, yes.”

Walter nodded. “I don't remember reading anywhere that the murderer was ever found.”

“No. They're still looking.”

Walter thought he heard annoyance in Kimmel's tone. He imagined that Kimmel's body had stiffened, ever so slightly. Walter didn't know where to go from there. He wrung his driving gloves between his hands, and sought for a phrase to take leave on.

“Why? Did you know my wife?” Kimmel asked.

“Oh, no, I simply remembered the name—by accident.”

“I see,” he said in his precise, pleasant voice. His eyes did not leave Walter's face.

Walter looked at the broad, plump back of Kimmel's right hand. The light from over the desk fell on it, and Walter could see a spattering of freckles and no hair at all. Suddenly Walter felt sure that Kimmel knew he had come to the shop only to look at him, to assuage some sordid curiosity. Kimmel knew now that he lived in Long Island. Kimmel was standing very close to him. A sudden fear came over Walter that Kimmel might lift his thick slab of a hand and knock his head off his neck. “I hope they find the man who's guilty.”

“Thank you,” Kimmel said.

“I'm sorry I've intruded like this,” Walter said awkwardly.

“But you haven't intruded!” Kimmel said with sudden heartiness. The bulging lips, shaped somewhat like an obese, horizontally divided heart, worked nervously. “Thank you for your good wishes.”

Walter walked towards the front door, and Kimmel followed him closely, courteously. Walter felt suddenly easier, and yet in the last few seconds, actually at the moment Kimmel had protested that he had not intruded, Walter had felt that it was possible Kimmel could have killed his wife. It was not his physical brutishness, not the wariness in his eyes; it was the sudden overfriendliness. It even occurred to Walter that Kimmel had been relieved to know that he was only wishing him well, and that he was not a police detective. Walter turned at the door and without thinking held out his hand.

Kimmel took the hand, shook it with a surprisingly soft grip, and bowed a little.

“Good-bye,” Walter said. “Thank you.”

“Good-bye.”

Walter crossed the street to his car. He looked back at the shop from the car and saw Melchior Kimmel standing behind the glass of the front door, saw him raise his arm and pass his hand slowly over the naked top of his head, the gesture of one who relaxes after a period of tension. Walter saw him walk serenely back into the depths of his shop, bald head high and the long arms standing a little out from his huge body.

Melchior Kimmel sat down at his desk and stared into the cluttered cubbyholes. Another snooper, he thought, only a more intelligent and better dressed one than most. Or had he
possibly
been a detective? Melchior Kimmel's tiny eyes nearly closed as he went over their conversation cautiously. No, the man had been too genuinely ill at ease, and, besides, what had he tried to find out? Nothing. He'd had the feeling the man really was a lawyer—though he hadn't said he was. Kimmel reached for the tablet on which he had written the man's name and the book he wanted, tore off the yellow page and stuck it into the cubbyhole where he kept his outgoing matters. The gesture, as if it had started a machinery of habitual gestures, was followed by more picking up and putting away of papers, letters, various notebooks of all sizes into various cubbyholes of the desk in front of him that looked as complicated as some kind of switchboard. His heavy body rolled with his movements, and for a few moments his brain seemed to be concentrated in his fat arms and hands. Before he deposited one little brown notebook in its proper cubbyhole he opened it to a page near the back and drew a short vertical line followed by the date and “see B-2489,” which was the number on the next order page minus one. There were seven vertical lines now with dates beside them on the page, and three asterisks with dates. The three asterisks stood for police detectives, men whom he had been able to recognize as police detectives and who probably thought they had not been recognized. The rest were merely visitors. And Kimmel did not think the whole list of much importance.

He yawned, stretching his fat fists up, arching his strong back sensuously. Then he relaxed and leaned back in the armless, leather-padded chair. He closed his eyes and let his head hang, supported a little on the fat below his jaw. But he did not doze. He was savoring the delicious sensations of his relaxing muscles, the laziness that flowed softly through his body and down his arms to his limp, bulbous finger ends. It had been a busy Saturday.

10

I
t was around nine when Walter got home. He had brought a dozen white chrysanthemums for Clara. She was sitting in the living-room, going over some office papers that she had spread out on the sofa.

“Hello,” he said. “Sorry I was late for dinner. I didn't even know whether you'd be here or not.”

“Oh, that's quite all right.”

“These are for you.” He handed her the box.

She looked at the box, then up at him.

Walter's smile went away. “Do you want me to put them in a vase for you?” His voice was suddenly tense.

“Please do,” she said coolly, as if the flowers had nothing to do with her.

Walter opened the box in the kitchen and filled a vase with water. He had even written a little card: “To my own Clara.” He tore it up and dropped it in the empty flower box.

“How was Ellie?” Clara asked when he brought the flowers into the living-room.

Walter did not answer. He put the vase on the coffee table and took a cigarette from the box and lighted it.

“Why don't you spend the rest of the evening with her?”

That's a fine idea, Walter thought, but he kept his mouth closed and his teeth set. He went into the kitchen, washed his hands and face with soap at the sink, and dried them on a paper towel. Then he went down the hall to the front door. Clara was saying something else as he went out.

He looked around in the Three Brothers Tavern to see if Bill or Joel was there. He would have liked to have a drink with them. There was no one he knew. He waved hello to the barman, Ben, then went to the Manhattan telephone directory and looked for Ellie Briess's number. He saw an Ellen Briess and an Elspeth Briess. The Elspeth Briess address seemed more likely. Walter called it. The operator told him that the number had been changed. She gave him a number in Lennert, Long Island.

Ellie answered. She said she had just moved that day.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “Have you had dinner yet?”

“I haven't even thought about it. I had to stay at school today till four, and the moving men just dumped everything in the middle of the floor. Sorry, I don't think I can get away for dinner.”